How GIS Has Changed Our World

climate change

Hurricanes can cause massive amounts of destruction. Changes in climate have produced very extreme weather patterns, some of which included Hurricane Katrina and most recently, Hurricane Harvey. Here is a link to a map on Google of Hurricane Harvey’s pathway.

The iceberg, called B-15, has been drifting away from Antartica for around 20 years, covering more than 6,600 miles. The iceberg has gradually fractured into multiple smaller sections, and the section pictured is called B-15Z.

This map tracks the course of B-15Z over time, and the iceberg is now passing the South Georgian Islands. The iceberg is nearing the equator, and the warmer tropical waters will quickly melt away the gargantuan ice mass,

Climate change is always a hot topic, literally. With the melting of the ice caps, the unstable polar vortex which influences the jet stream, and with temperatures becoming more extreme, it is no mystery that sea level is continuing to rise. We wanted to visualize the threat of sea level rise by making a map that shows the potential projections of how our coasts in New Jersey and New York could eventual look.

We zoomed in to focus on New York City and the Northeastern part of the New Jersey coastline. We gathered the information for sea level rise from usgs.gov and then created the map using our Mappler technology. The first image is what the coast currently looks like, with the second and third images showing possible sea level rise projections. Image 2 shows sea level rise projections for 2100 if climate change continues without us taking action. This projection shows a 2m rise, with the dark blue border showing the potential new coastline. Image 3 is the worse case scenario for the year 2100, meaning that this is what scientists are projecting if again no action towards stopping or slowing climate change takes place and if the Greenland ice sheet melts. Image 3 shows a 7m sea level rise, and as you can see the land taken is massive. These maps show the scary reality that we could face if climate change is not taken seriously. You think that the population and its growth are bad now? How about when we then have to face displacement of part of the population because land where they use to live is covered in water? Take action, educate on climate change, and do your part!

To see the map and view more of the NJ and NY coast projections click here!

Google, Microsoft and Intel have joined President Barack Obama’s Climate Data Initiative and are providing mapping data and information to the US government as part of US

Google will donate one petabyte of cloud storage for climate data,50m hours of high-performance computing with the Google Earth Engine platform. Intel is planning to host three climate-change hackathons in the US this year to challenge engineering and computer science students to create helpful new apps and tools from existing federal data. Microsoft has launched a competition to find 40 research projects on the project, each which will receive Azure access to the tune of 20 terabytes of storage and 180,000 hours of runtime.

More maps will be created in the future as they receive more contributions from other areas of the scientific community.